So far, 2014 has been good to Red Hat.

Last week, we announced the second quarter results of our fiscal year 2015 and based on the strength of our financial metrics, I'm pleased to say that we're on the right track. Thank you to all of our employees, customers, partners, and the broader open source community for your amazing support of Red Hat. Customers around the world continue to turn to Red Hat as the trusted adviser and provider of choice for IT challenges both big and small, and for that, we’re both thankful and inspired. It’s been one amazing – and busy! - summer at Red Hat, so I wanted to reflect on some of our accomplishments in the past few months.

 

Last quarter marked the 50th quarter of revenue growth for Red Hat - marking more than 12 years of consecutive revenue growth - helping Red Hat land, for a second time, on Forbes Magazine "World's Most Innovative Companies" list.

 

Beyond our positive financial results last week, we announced a definitive agreement to acquire FeedHenry, a leading enterprise mobile application platform provider. Mobile devices are here to stay in the enterprise. Many organizations are looking at how to best extend their existing enterprise applications to mobile devices, and new applications are being built with mobile top of mind from the beginning. In this way, FeedHenry is an important addition to our Red Hat JBoss Middleware portfolio and our JBoss xPaaS for OpenShift strategy, expanding our already broad portfolio of application development, integration, and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions. Craig Muzilla, senior vice president of our Application Platform Business, shared more thoughts on the FeedHenry news in a blog post that is worth reading.

 

This acquisition makes our third of the fiscal year. In June, we announced our acquisition of eNovance, a leading cloud computing services company that will enable us to meet demand for enterprise OpenStack consulting, design and deployment. And in April, we celebrated the acquisition of Inktank, which offers scale-out, open source storage systems based on Ceph, a top storage distribution for OpenStack. When I talk to customers and partners, they are excited about the moves Red Hat is making, and they are thrilled by the leadership and enterprise open source know-how Red Hat is bringing to a promising and fast-growing project like OpenStack. Both the eNovance and Inktank acquisitions – coupled with key relationships and initiatives with industry leaders and our continuing upstream leadership – show how deeply committed we are to customer success there.

 

Key to delivering on Red Hat’s vision of the open hybrid cloud is our partners. Earlier this month, Red Hat and Cisco announced a new integrated infrastructure solution for OpenStack-based cloud deployments. Together, we aim to deliver a set of Intercloud-ready solutions designed to bring OpenStack to enterprise and service provider customers. Our work will provide fully supported, certified platforms that deliver open source innovation and optimized functionality needed for building out clouds. In the telecommunication space, we also had a significant announcement with Nokia, bringing Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform to their telco cloud in support of the carriers' transition to cloud-based services and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) that have the potential to transform that industry. In July, we announced a key collaboration with Google to drive a new open standard around orchestrating Docker containers at scale for the management of cloud application deployments.

 

Red Hat continues to deliver significant innovations and new products to support our customers, and last quarter was no exception, with key launches including Red Hat Satellite 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, our flagship operating platform, debuted with excitement from customers and partners alike all around the globe. To think, it was 20 years ago when Marc Ewing created the first Red Hat Linux distribution and to be here in 2014, rolling out the seventh enterprise addition, is remarkable. The original vision for Red Hat Enterprise Linux was simple - to create the best enterprise-class server operating system. But the community has taken Linux further than any of us could ever have imagined. It now serves as a foundation for the next-generation datacenter.

 

I’m certainly biased, but I believe Red Hat Enterprise Linux is easily the best operating platform in the world, counting more than 90% of the Fortune 500 as customers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 was easily our most ambitious release to date, and the advancements we’ve delivered in support of the modern datacenter and in areas like cloud, big data and Linux containers are truly setting the bar.

 

Speaking of Linux containers, the momentum and adoption over the last year has been astounding. Linux containers aren't new, they've been around for years. Projects like Docker and Kubernetes are helping to drive innovation and adoption in new ways, and I’m thrilled that from OpenShift (and GearD) to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host (and Project Atomic), Red Hat has been an early leader in both our upstream efforts and our work to bring these innovations to customers.

 

Right now, we're in the midst of a major shift from client-server to cloud-mobile. It's a once-every-twenty-years kind of change. As history has shown us, in the early days of those changes, winners emerge that set the standards for that era – think Wintel in the client-server arena. We're staring at a huge opportunity – the chance to become the leader in enterprise cloud, much like we are the leader in enterprise open source. The competition is fierce, and companies will have several choices for their cloud needs. But the prize is the chance to establish open source as the default choice of this next era, and to position Red Hat as the provider of choice for enterprises' entire cloud infrastructure.

 

We want to show customers that open is better. We are bringing customers the tools they need to build their infrastructure from the ground up with open source, enabling amazing flexibility and choice.

 

We want to be the undisputed leader in enterprise cloud, and that's why Red Hat is going to continue to push. We're going to continue to grow our capabilities in OpenStack, OpenShift and CloudForms. We're going to continue to push our advances in storage and middleware and offer those to customers and our partner ecosystem. We're going to continue to offer what we see as the best operating platform in the world. And we're going to continue to work hand-in-hand with our customers, partners and the open source community to deliver the best open source infrastructure stack we can.

 

I’m thrilled with our progress, and excited about the opportunity that lies ahead!


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Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies.

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